The Hidden Accessibility Risks of a Website Redesign (And How to Avoid Relaunching Into a Lawsuit)

A redesign feels like progress. New brand, cleaner layout, faster pages, and finally a site you are not embarrassed to link to. So it comes as an unpleasant surprise to learn that a redesign is one of the most common moments for a website to lose accessibility — and for a business to walk straight into a legal complaint it did not see coming.

It happens more than you would think. A site that had plain, boring, keyboard-friendly HTML gets replaced by a slick, animated, image-heavy design built to impress in a pitch deck. The new version looks better to sighted visitors and worse to everyone using a screen reader, keyboard, or magnifier. Nobody on the project noticed, because nobody on the project was testing for it.

If you are planning a redesign, or you just finished one, this guide walks through where accessibility quietly breaks and what to check at each stage. You will not need to write code or understand technical standards. You just need to know what questions to ask and what to look for.

Why redesigns are risky

Your current site, whatever its flaws, has one thing going for it: it has survived contact with real users. Over months or years, obvious problems got smoothed out. A redesign throws all of that away and starts fresh — new templates, new components, new third-party widgets, new content structure. Every one of those is a chance to introduce a barrier.

Three things make redesigns especially dangerous:

Visual ambition. Redesigns are usually driven by how the site looks. Designers reach for large hero images, low-contrast “elegant” color palettes, thin fonts, custom dropdowns, sliders, and scroll animations. Each of these can be built accessibly, but the accessible version takes more care — and if nobody asks for it, you get the quick version.

New tools and templates. A redesign often means a new theme, a new page builder, or a new set of plugins. You are trusting that whoever made those tools cared about accessibility. Many did not. A single inaccessible template can multiply one mistake across every page of your site.

The “it’s brand new, it must be fine” assumption. People assume a modern, professional-looking site is automatically a compliant one. It is not. Some of the least accessible sites on the web are the most beautifully designed. Newness is not a substitute for testing.

And here is the legal wrinkle: relaunching resets the clock in the worst way. If your old site had a known issue you were slowly fixing, a court might see a business acting in good faith. If your brand-new site ships with fresh barriers, it is much harder to argue you did not have the chance to get it right. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act in the US and the European Accessibility Act in the EU, the standard applied to websites is WCAG 2.1 Level AA — and a redesign is exactly the moment you are expected to meet it.

Before the redesign: set the ground rules

The cheapest time to fix accessibility is before a single page is built. Once a design is approved and coded, changing it costs real money and nobody wants to redo work. So the most powerful thing you can do is put accessibility into the brief.

Write it into the contract. If you are hiring an agency, freelancer, or web designer, state in writing that the delivered site must conform to WCAG 2.1 AA. Do not leave it as a vague “make it accessible.” Name the standard, and make it an acceptance criterion — something the vendor has to demonstrate before the project is considered finished. Our guide on questions to ask a web designer about accessibility gives you the exact language and follow-up questions to use.

Ask who is responsible for testing. A shocking number of web projects have nobody explicitly responsible for accessibility. The designer assumes the developer will handle it; the developer assumes the designer chose accessible colors; everyone assumes the client will say something if it matters. Assign it to a named person and ask what tools and manual checks they will run.

Audit the current site first. Before you throw it away, run a quick check on your existing site and note what actually works. If your current contact form is keyboard-friendly and your current colors pass contrast, you want to carry those wins forward, not lose them. Our five-minute accessibility audit shows you how to do this with free, built-in browser tools — no developer required.

Get sample components reviewed early. Ask to see the key interactive pieces — the navigation menu, the main form, any sliders or pop-ups — as working prototypes before the whole site is built on top of them. If the menu cannot be operated by keyboard at the prototype stage, fixing it there is cheap. Fixing it after every page uses it is not.

During the redesign: watch the high-risk components

Certain parts of a site break far more often than others. If you keep an eye on these, you catch most problems before launch.

Navigation menus. Fancy mega-menus and hamburger menus are a top offender. Test the simplest thing: can you open and use the menu with only the Tab and Enter keys, no mouse? If not, keyboard users — including many people using screen readers — cannot navigate your site at all.

Forms. Contact forms, quote requests, booking widgets, and checkout flows are where lawsuits and lost customers concentrate. Every field needs a visible label that stays put (not placeholder text that vanishes when you type). Errors need to be described in words, not just a red outline. A redesign that replaces a plain form with a stylish multi-step one is a classic place for this to go wrong.

Color and contrast. New brand palettes love light gray text on white, or pale buttons that “feel modern.” Much of it fails contrast requirements and becomes unreadable for people with low vision. Check text against its background and make sure information is never conveyed by color alone — a red asterisk with no label does not tell a colorblind user anything.

Images and icons. Redesigns add imagery aggressively. Every meaningful image needs alternative text describing it, and critical information — your phone number, hours, prices, promotions — must be real text, not baked into a graphic where screen readers and zoom cannot reach it.

Animations and auto-playing content. Scroll effects, parallax, auto-advancing carousels, and background videos look impressive in a demo and can be genuinely disabling for people with vestibular disorders or attention differences. Anything that moves should be pausable, and the site should respect the visitor’s “reduce motion” setting.

Third-party widgets. Chat bubbles, booking tools, review widgets, and cookie banners are often dropped in without a thought to accessibility, and they can block the whole page. The cookie consent banner in particular has become a frequent complaint target because it appears first and traps keyboard focus.

After launch: verify, don’t assume

The site is live. This is the point where most teams exhale and stop paying attention — which is exactly the wrong instinct.

Run a real check before you announce it. Ideally, test the new site before it replaces the old one, on a staging URL. If that ship has sailed, test it the day it goes live, not weeks later. Walk through your most important journeys — find a product, fill the contact form, complete a booking — using only your keyboard. Then try turning on the screen reader already built into your computer (VoiceOver on Mac, Narrator on Windows) and listen to your homepage. It is uncomfortable the first time, and it will teach you more than any report.

Publish an accessibility statement. A clear statement tells visitors you take access seriously and gives them a way to report problems directly to you instead of to a lawyer. It is one of the simplest trust signals you can add, and it demonstrates good faith. Our guide to writing an accessibility statement walks through what to include.

Set up a feedback path. Make sure there is an obvious, working way for someone to tell you “I can’t use this.” An email address or a monitored form is enough. The businesses that get sued are frequently the ones where a customer tried to complain, got ignored, and escalated.

Re-check after every future change. Accessibility is not a launch-day event. New blog posts, new landing pages, a new plugin, a seasonal promo banner — any of these can reintroduce a barrier. Build a five-minute check into your routine whenever you ship something new.

The bottom line

A redesign is the best opportunity you will get to make your website genuinely accessible, and the easiest opportunity to accidentally make it worse. The difference comes down to whether anyone was watching. Put accessibility in the brief, keep an eye on the high-risk components while the work happens, and verify the result before you celebrate. Done that way, your new site is not just prettier — it is usable by more of your customers and far less likely to land you a demand letter.

You do not need to become an expert. You need to ask a few pointed questions at the right moments and refuse to accept “it looks great” as proof that it works for everyone.

We’re building a simple accessibility checker for non-developers — no DevTools, no jargon. Join our waitlist to get early access.